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Open Grid Services Architecture Data Access and Integration

The huge increase in the volume of data produced in research and business environments in the last decade has been likened to a "data explosion". Not only is this data volumes on a massive scale, it is also heterogeneous and dynamic and in many cases needs to be shared across both organisational and geographical boundaries. Accordingly, data management is increasingly challenging to both research and business organisations alike.

Since 2002, the OGSA-DAI project has been working to develop an effective solution to the data management challenge and in particular to data access and integration problems. Our resulting product - OGSA-DAI™ - is a middleware solution that allows resources, such as relational or XML databases to be accessed via the grid. Fully-customisable, the product can be tailored to meet the exact requirements of specific communities, projects and businesses.

Today, more than 3700 registered research and business users from the UK and Europe as well as the US, China, Japan and Russia are using OGSA-DAI™ to grid-enable their data resources. Numerous examples of successful deployment can be found in sectors including geographical information systems, meteorology, transport, computer-aided design, engineering, astronomy and medical research.

OGSA-DAI™ software is free and open-source and our latest version 3.0 is available to download from this website.

Funded by the UK e-Science Programme, OGSA-DAI™ is developed by the OGSA-DAI team based at EPCC at the University of Edinburgh and at NeSC. The project is currently a partner in OMII-UK. OGSA-DAI is an active member of the Globus Alliance and works closely with the Open Grid Forum DAIS Working Group.